Riccardo Pedrotti: Surgery theory

In this talk we will cover the main ideas of Gompf-Stipsicz chapters 5.2-5.3: We will introduce the technique of “surgery” and how it can be used to study manifolds. Moreover we will discuss some applications of it. The second part we will discuss the main ideas behind the concept of Dehn surgery, which is ubiquitous in low dimensional topology, and frame it as a “generalised” version of of the surgery techniques introduced before. 

Seminar website: https://sites.google.com/view/rsgt-umass/home